For some background, I live in New York City, where cheap umbrellas are plentiful. For years, I would buy $7 umbrellas from the local bodega and just replace them if they broke or I lost them. I must have gone through 4-5 umbrellas a year and recently after the last one broke I decided to look on Amazon for an alternative.

If I was going to spend more money on an umbrella, I put together some simple criteria:

We moved to Philadelphia last year in July after five years of living in DC (Capitol Hill and H Street NE). We lived in a rowhouse which did not have a backyard so we were excited that our new place had a sizable (for the city) back patio and yard. We didn’t spend a ton of time back there last year so we told ourselves that we needed to make the space more “livable.” I took some initial steps towards that goal this weekend by getting a large patio umbrella.